(some of) america's best bicycling cities

This story about America's best bicycling cities is one of those semi-lame, superficial stories that pop up when you log out of yahoo mail, and often seem tempting to click on. But then when you do, they are essentially junk food: the information equivalent of empty calories.

Anyway, it's worth a very quick perusal for cyclists, and here's a list of the cities they mention:

• Austin
  
• Eugene
  
• Boulder
  
• San Diego
  
• Seattle
  
• New York
  
• Minneapolis
  

I've lived in one, biked in four, and have been to all of them, most many times (Eugene only once, Austin three times, the rest multiple times.) My primary comment would be that I'm a little dubious of the claim that "San Diego tops most lists of best cycling cities of over 1 million people, and it may one day surpass Portland..." San Diego is hilly, car-clogged, has fast, bad drivers, and doesn't have great bike lanes for getting between lots of important places. The Bayshore Bikeway that they trumpet is a nice recreational ride, but doesn't really get you anywhere useful if you live there.

Here are another couple bicycling lists:

America's Worst Cycling Cities from Bicycling Magazine. This one definitely falls into the empty information calorie category: it only lists three, doesn't indicate the methodology, and doesn't list Atlanta. Boo.

Kryptonite's 10 Worst Cities for Bike Theft This one is somewhat better, since it ostensibly is grounded in quantitative metrics. Yay. Though it's a generally accepted notion that bike theft is significantly underreported. Boo. Note how many of the cities listed here are also in the top 10 cities in the yahoo article above. Boo.

Way too many of these lists and city analyses largely ignore the cyclists who bike daily to live and work and run errands, and focus instead on rides and facilities for spandex clad weekend warriors on multi-thousand dollar carbon fiber, Dura-Ace equipped road bikes. Boo.

FUN POLL: Should I rename this blog to something like "booyay.blogspot.com"?